Tag Archives: all_arguments

Deb’s been on about getting another cat recently.
“Absolutely not !”, I said, putting my foot down very firmly.
Oh yes, we all know who wears the trousers in this house thank you very much.
So…Cleo the Kitten is now making herself at home.

In fact, she’s on the desk now, sniffing at the key..$#%3″!Q…make that running across the keyboard.
Obviously, she’s not quite mastered the basics of shell scripting yet ( although she does evidently know that it employs most of the keys on the top row of the keyboard).
Maybe we need to start her off with something a little less complicated.
Not however, the sanctity of those cute and fluffy Oracle IDEs, I’ve had quite enough cute and fluffy for one day.
Instead we’re going to have a look at the grizzled old moggy that is SQL*Plus.

In my defence, I will say that the use of SQL*Plus is a something of a necessity for me as I spend a lot of time on the train and so write much of my ramblings on a small, elderly netbook.
I’ve got XE running on it so firing up an IDE will slow things down considerably.
And yes, OK, I did start programming before the World Wide Web and GUI desktops…but no, not before the invention of the internal combustion engine, Deborah. Honestly, haven’t you got a kitten you should be playing with ?

My starting point is simply this – wouldn’t it be great if you could use the DESCRIBE function to lookup a single member of a package in SQL*Plus.

So, what I’m going to cover here is :

How to get argument details for package members from the Data Dictionary

Building a pipelined function ( using a cursor for loop)

Mimicing the DESCRIBE functionality using SQL*Plus structures and formatting